Legislative barriers to promotion of collective bargaining: Changes to the Employment Relations Act 2000 which came into effect in 2015 create several new barriers to collective bargaining including the right of employers to opt out from bargaining for multi-employer collective agreements when sent a notice of initiation (s 44A-44C of the Employment Relations Act 2000). Employers need not to give a reason for doing so. Effectively, this change blocks the ability of unions to bargain at any level above the enterprise.

Exclusion of film industry workers from the right to bargain collectively: Changes to the Employment Law introduced as a result of the dispute between the Actors Equity and the Film industry backed by the film giant Warner Brothers removed the right of workers in the film industry to challenge their employment status. As a result, film workers are now deemed contractors and miss out on collective bargaining rights: they have no right to take industrial action in pursuit of a collective agreement or access to various mechanisms intended to help the parties to come to an agreement. Individually, contractors are denied protections against unfair disadvantage and unjustified dismissal, minimum statutory terms and conditions (such as minimum wage rates) and several protections implied into employment contracts such as good faith and fair dealing.

Refusals to negotiate: A national chain of hardware stores – Bunnings – unilaterally changed working hours and introduced the obligation of on-call work with no guarantee of stable hours. The changes were unjustified in the view of the company's recorded profits. In addition, the changes have been introduced regardless of the ongoing Parliamentary legislative debate to outlaw the zero-hour contracts. The company refused to negotiate changes with the unions.

AFFCO introduced several unfavourable changes to employment terms and conditions (including no obligation for the company to re-hire workers after seasonal lay-offs, cuts in wages, etc.) and either refused to meet with unions or proposed impossible-to-agree-to new clauses, with an apparent lack of intention to conclude an agreement.

The Talley's Rangiuru Plan refused to negotiate planned lay-offs despite an obligation under the collective agreement and despite several requests for discussion from the part of the trade union. As a result, around 100 workers were laid off, all of them trade union members with security rights over workers with much shorter service.

Fresh Max company (fresh food supplier) had persistently refused to negotiate a collective agreement aimed at protecting workers, despite ongoing serious violations of fundamental rights, such as sexual harassment and assault and the use of child labour. The issue was finally solved only when the FIRST trade union went to the Countdown, the source company for Fresh Max, and demanded to put pressure on the basis of the Countdown's ethical supply chain obligations and policies.

There were also cases of refusal to bargain amounting to anti-union discrimination. The employer in the private education sector, when faced with an invitation to bargain from the part of the union covering teachers in the private sector, threatened workers with the immediate reduction of salary rates if the union insisted on bargaining. As a result, the threatened workers left the union and the bargaining collapsed.

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